Events
May 14 is the deadline for submitting short papers to the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). The conference itself will be August 20-23 in London.
May 14 is the next Boston IF meetup.
May 18, the Baltimore / DC Area Meetup will discuss The Empty Chamber from Spring Thing.
May 22, the London IF Meetup hears from Chris Gardiner about the narrative direction of Sunless Skies — how the Failbetter team set a course for their content, how they developed it, and how/when they chose to course-correct.
The 2nd International Summer School on AI and Games will be held in New York City, May 27-31. The event is organized by Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius, who wrote the Artificial Intelligence and Games book. More info can be found at the site.
Narrascope is set for June 14-16 in Boston, MA. This is a new games conference that will support interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players.
They’ve also just announced their keynote speaker, Natalia Martinsson. Both Graham and I will be speaking, Graham about the future of Inform. More information can be found on NarraScope’s home site.
ICCC 2019 takes place on June 17-21 in Charlotte, NC. The event is in its tenth year and is organized by the Association for Computational Creativity.
Articles and Podcasts
Elizabeth Smyth gives readers a glimpse into her creative process, and her new game The Invader. (I’ve previously discussed Smyth’s work with her IFComp entry Bogeyman, listing it as one of my favorites of 2018.)
Bruno Dias discusses the theme of failure as it shows up in storytelling; particularly the different types of failure that frequently can be found in Interactive Fiction
Announcements
When Cryptozookeeper was originally released in 2011, it won five XYZZY awards as well as Best Game for writer Robb Sherwin. This month, Sherwin and Mantissa Ltd have come out with a mobile version of the classic text adventure, and is available for download here, for both Apple and Google Play.
Jobs
Wharton (yes, the business school) is hiring an interactive fiction coder to help with an educational narrative project. This is a full-time job with benefits.
Books
On the plane back from Albany a few days ago, I read Stacey Abrams’ Lead from the Outside. It’s not about games or much about writing — though Abrams is also a fiction writer, this book doesn’t get into that — but I was really impressed with what it has to say about leadership, purpose and self-knowledge, and self-assessment in a world that doesn’t always reflect us back accurately. Sometimes I talk about the need for more guidance in how leadership works for women. If you also feel that need, maybe read this book.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 